Precarity and inertia

I9

I think...one of the most present problems right now is...how precarious everything is around us in terms of our living spaces, we have no control over [them], we...pay all this rent [and] it's just burned off….The places we work, we have no control over the vast majority of them so that we're just thrust around here and there. We're fired with no notice, we have to deal with all kinds of unfair working conditions depending on the whim of the employers and this creates a lot of problems for everyone. We're stressed out, we're just left with no energy and time at the end of the day other than to watch TV or zone out or whatever.

Climate crisis and fascism

I3

From what I can tell the environmental changes that we're going through at a global scale are really concretely affecting a lot of people and the way that they can survive. Especially people who live or are more directly dependent [on] direct production [on] the land,….people who live in areas where climate already generates conditions of precarity, and that's exacerbated and we can see shifts [in] accessibility [of] resources, [of] food, already happening. I fear that those who have access right now will increasingly follow a trend...towards fascism in terms of claiming and enclosing access, in very rigid and violent ways, excluding [others from being able to] access...resources and food.

Moving on

I21

I think that your generation is starting ahead of where my generation started and that brings me some hope. Now I think there are a bunch of things that I think you guys are doing that is totally as stupid as we did but there are things that I think you are thinking about, and concerned about, and critical about, and open about that was not reflected in the left wing movements of the sixties and seventies….there were many things we couldn't have known. But I think this generation of activists has a body of knowledge based on the trajectory of things that have happened in the last thirty, forty years that you are actually more humble about.

Radical dialogue

I14

For Marxism to work it has to be a discussion and if you look at the period where...the great Marxist revolutions happened, I mean the early 1900s, it was a discussion. Lenin and Trotsky would debate each other, Luxemburg would debate, other folks from Germany or from France would weigh in on those debates. It was a conversation about...what tactics the progressive movement should be using but also on the actual composition of what Marxist theory is and then with the establishment of the Soviet Union it became this very, very doctrinaire approach to Marxism which is an absolute failure and has led us to the point where I think the left is the weakest it's ever been since the rise of capitalism in a lot of ways.

A new party

I16

I think there has to be a new party. I think there has to be a new communist party, that's what I think. We see that we're not able to get legislation in this province to protect workers in the workplace. We see that we have something in the order of one in eight children living below the poverty level and families not having enough food to eat. I don't think this can be solved by tinkering around the edges and sending in a social worker. We need to have some kind of spirited organization that is going to consistently fight.

A rock and a hard place

I23

Yes, socialism is still necessary but at the present moment if there is no real socialist possibility we might have to bite the bullet and become involved in reform activities which we have very little hope in. That's the present tragic dilemma of the Left and of the world.

The limits of success

I20

I think that what makes us successful is also our weakness. We are super successful at a certain kind of advocacy work and a certain kind of change work but...in some ways having a lot of credibility with government, with media, in the case of some of our campaigns with industry in fact means that we are not as open or part explicitly of wider change movements or wider justice movements. So...our success in one area limits our ability to be a real agent for wider change, so I think that's a barrier in the long term if not necessarily right now.

Radical values

I6

I don't want to point to a specific example of an activist initiative and say that this is the guide to the future. My own feeling is that there are values that I think I'd like to see broadened to be values that people can work with. Things like solidarity, affinity, autonomy, cooperation over competition, these sorts of vague themes. And then there are various experiments with those which are sometimes inspiring, like cooperatives. Those sorts of things have those values in them.

Prefiguring alternatives, resisting the status quo

I3

We need to organize outside of the current mainstream political structures and create, pre-emptively, alternative ways of organizing and living and generating living, breathing examples of other ways of living. One strategy can't really exist without the other. I think if we organize, if we do our own thing, and yet we completely ignore the mainstream political system and let it turn to fascism then whatever alternative pockets exist might get screwed in the long run and, at the same time, if we just depend on asking [for] reforms of the political system then all we're going to get are scraps all the time and never have any kind of real change before it's too late.

Winning right now

I14

So, short term what would winning mean to me? I would like to see the Canada health act pass into legislation right now. I'd like to see [the former] NDP government pushed on a variety of different fronts from below to keep it to the minimum promises it made and I'd like to see the beginnings of building some kind of mass progressive movement here in Nova Scotia. That to me would be the short term win.